Irrläufer in der Dresdner Porzellansammlung Fehlzuweisungen bei der Rückkehr aus der Sowjetunion 1958

Abstract

During the Second World War, the holdings of Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft Dresden were taken to almost fifty different depots to keep them safe, among them many palaces near Dresden. In May 1945, immediately after the end of the war, the Red Army’s trophy brigades started to search after those stored art treasures. The artworks went directly to the Soviet Union as compensation for war damage caused by Nazi-Germany. In 1958, a restitution to the GDR of all in all 1,5 million artworks of various kind took place; 600.000 of these artworks went to Dresden. At the moment of the actual take-over in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, large parts of the artworks were sorted by material, not by museum. This is why there were so many misallocations, meaning that a lot of objects went into the wrong museum. The Porzellansammlung Dresden (Dresden Porcelain Collection) and Friedenstein Stiftung Gotha (Friedenstein Foundation Gotha) both serve as examples to showcase such an intermingling of art holdings. In spring 2024, an unexpected opportunity arose to research a file dating from 1947 on looted art taken by Ukrainian trophy brigades which is currently held at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Kiev. This yielded much new evidence regarding the Porzellansammlung Dresden and valuable new insights into the history of the collection. The case also underscores that even today, 66 years after the extensive restitution campaign, misallocations or ‘Irrläufer’ still form an important area of provenance research.